Two Mexican illegals idle
in a Brooklyn parking lot late at night. Then they're pinned into their car by
two other vehicles, and one—a sewage truck—empties its payload
through the sunroof, drowning the women in a sea of shit. Welcome to Colin
Harrison's New York, where the trickle-down effect involves an extravagantly
wealthy man urinating in his marble bathtub every morning, and a pair of
innocent laborers catching the waste on the other end. A master of literate
sleaze, Harrison (The Havana Room, Afterburn) adds another compulsively readable
thriller to the pile with The Finder, his latest foray into the city's Darwinian
underbelly. In this world, money is power and power is exerted from the top
down, creating a sort of vicious hierarchy in which men from every social
stratum are obliged to turn the screws on the one right below.
As it turns out, the shit
wasn't meant for the two Mexican women; it was intended for their Chinese
supervisor, Jin Li, who runs an after-hours office-cleaning and
document-shredding outfit called CorpServe. CorpServe has a hidden service in
corporate espionage: Jin seeks out sensitive inside information and leaks it to
her brother Chen, who in turn serves a group of Chinese investors intent on
manipulating the stock market to their advantage. Based on Jin's findings,
Chen's group has made a killing shorting stock in a drug company called Good
Pharma, but when the powers that be uncover this scheme, they go after her.
Good Pharma's glad-handing number-two man wanted to "send a message" to Jin,
though he never intended for anyone to die. But once the wheels are in motion,
all sorts of opportunistic scumbags come out of the woodwork. Jin's safety
rests in the hands of her ex-boyfriend Ray, a former 9/11 firefighter who has
his own crosses to bear.
Much like his last book, The
Havana Room,
Harrison excels more at setup than follow-through; his ending hastily resolves
a thicket of story strands that were more deftly orchestrated in the first two
acts. Nevertheless, he creates a gallery of colorful heroes and lowlifes, from
a diabolical alpha male who turns a cocktail-party prostate exam into something
more horrifying than it sounds, to Ray's father, a terminally ill former
detective who contributes to the cause between narcotizing shots of Dilaudid.
As ever, Harrison doesn't mind getting his hands dirty, and when he's at his
best, as he is throughout much of The Finder, trash doesn't get more
sophisticated.